Sitting in a quiet carriage of a train to Gatwick Airport, my thoughts turned to the women taking this same route back to Ireland after travelling to the UK for abortions. I wondered if anyone was on this train for that very purpose. More than 170 000 women have travelled abroad from Ireland seeking abortions since 1980.

Having arrived at Gatwick Airport, I met two volunteers working with the London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign who were taking the same flight to Dublin as me.

Sajid Javid will come under pressure from a crossbench group of MPs to bring forward a bill that would allow reformers to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland.

More than 30 MPs have pledged to send the home secretary written questions on Monday demanding the domestic abuse bill be brought before parliament by the autumn. This would allow pro-choice MPs to put down an amendment that would give women in Northern Ireland the right to access terminations.

Abortion and Love
Ireland’s wildly successful movement to repeal the Eighth Amendment has given us a new way to frame reproductive rights.

By Katha Pollitt
June 7, 2018

“There must be a way to make abortion rights be about love,” the journalist Anthea McTeirnan said to me when we met in Dublin in 2015, just before Ireland’s referendum on marriage equality. Same-sex marriage was going to win big, she believed, because the campaign was all about love and compassion and inclusion, not just abstract legal rights. People could see that their friends and neighbors and relatives simply wanted to express their commitment to their partners the way straight people do. The campaign reflected that spirit, full of joy and humor; its guiding spirit was the sweet and popular drag queen and bar owner Panti Bliss. And, as it turned out, McTeirnan was right: That May, the referendum won by 62 to 38 percent, making Ireland the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage through a popular vote.

Yes campaign’s outreach to middle ground delivered the landslide
Undecideds swung in huge numbers to Yes, as politicians struggled to keep up with pace of change

May 27, 2018
Pat Leahy

Politicians and politics are playing catch-up, following Friday’s vote. It happened before, with contraception, divorce and homosexuality. Now it has happened with abortion.

It’s not so much that the vote will change our society, but rather that it signals that society has already changed. It has conceded to women power over their own lives that had been previously withheld by the State.

Savita's Law? Pro-choice groups back call from family to name abortion legislation after her

David Young, Rachel Farrell and Laura Larkin
May 27 2018

PRO-CHOICE campaigners have backed calls for Ireland's new abortion laws to be named after Savita Halappanavar, the expectant mother who died after being refused a termination.

The Together for Yes coalition said the gesture would recognise the "great debt" the Irish people owed to Savita, the 31-year-old Indian dentist who died in a Galway hospital after doctors refused to perform an abortion as she miscarried.

In the last few days of the referendum campaign on the Eight Amendment dozens of small posters appeared around Dublin.

The image was of Savita Halappanavar, instantly recognisable from her thick dark hair, wide smile, smiling eyes, and the Bindi dot on the forehead. The message contained one word: Yes. They were striking in their simplicity and directness.

The Savita case (read Kitty Holland’s report from 2012 here) was never too far away from people’s minds during the eight weeks that this extraordinary referendum campaign seeped into Irish public consciousness on doorsteps, in the streets, in the media, or on the airwaves… right up to polling day.

Una Mullally: Referendum shows us there is no Middle Ireland, just Ireland
‘The fiction of Ireland as a conservative, dogmatically Catholic country has been shattered’

May 26, 2018
Una Mullally

The handover period is over. The fiction of Ireland as a conservative, dogmatically Catholic country has been shattered. The past is left back there, and a new legacy is being created. A legacy of compassion, empathy, and maturity - a country taking responsibility for the care and health of women and girls. What happened in the referendum vote was seismic, but more seismic still was the realisation that this vote was reflecting change, not just instigating it. “They listened to us. They actually listened to us,” a young woman said to me, crying, in the RDS on Saturday morning.

Together For Yes ran an excellent campaign, from start to finish. As the No campaign scraped the barrel, the Yes campaign always acted with dignity, with facts to the fore, and never once stooped. Together For Yes built an army around the country. An army of Us. In the RDS, people burst into tears when the Together For Yes bosses came into the room.

Dublin (CNN)As she held her 18-month old daughter closely to her chest, Amanda Mellet summed up in words what many in Ireland were feeling Saturday after the nation's referendum on abortion passed by a landslide.

"It just means that women -- and the men who love the women of Ireland -- have spoken out and they've said times have to change. And they are going to change now," a tearful Mellet said at the Royal Dublin Society, where the count took place throughout the day.

Ireland is the last Western democracy that still bans abortion, but that could end with today's referendum
Yes supporters say repealing the 8th amendment of the constitution in Friday's referendum acknowledges reality

Nahlah Ayed · CBC News
Posted: May 25, 2018

Twelve years ago, Tara Flynn became one of many Irish women who needed to "go to England."

Instead, she chose to go to the Netherlands — but the end result was the same: she had an abortion and flew back the very same day.